Africa

So say the liner notes, "One doesn't necessarily have to understand Ms.
Makeba's native tongue, or speak French, to comprehend the depth and scope
of this musical blend." Stop reading there; the rest is yap yap yap. This
bit is important though. You're probably not going to understand what she's
singing, but it's no big deal. Her sound and rhythm are the important parts,
she could be singing her grocery list for all I care. After lots of
listening, I've started to supply English approximations of her lyrics
("a cheek on my daughter, "poking a goose head.") It's an odd surprise
when she starts speaking English on one track, and a worse surprise when
what she's saying is a pretty horrible story. Maybe we'll skip that song
and go back to the imaginary grocery list.

Her voice tells me everything there is to know about being lithe and fluid.
Listen to tracks 11 and 12, and I dare you not to envision a tall gleaming
African woman swaying and shimmering on the veldt. I dare you not to
want to be her, at least with your hands, like butterflies in the air.
Maybe Africa doesn't have butterflies - fine, be a gazelle, be a veldt-y,
reedy plant thing, but I promise you, you will imagine yourself there in her
village, in the dry African air.

This has always been good afterglow music for me. Mind out of the gutter,
Tiger. I just mean, it makes excellent "boy do I ever feel good about this
stuff going down in my life" music. Soothing, then peppy, then sexy, she's
all over the spectrum, and it's nice.

The instruments are lovely but kept to a respectful minimum - a guitar being
plucked, something maraca-like being gently shi-shished. The spotlight is
where it should be: on Miriam. I only wish the songs were longer - it
seems that just when she's getting into a nice repetition, just when I could
almost sing along with her, she's on to another melody. A little
frustrating, but also makes me want to listen to it some more, and then a
little more. It's one of the very few albums I ever listen to more than
once in a row. It works well on repeat; each rhythm builds and flips into
the next one, like a paper chain, and the last leads into the first, and you
kind of just never want her to shut up, ever. You can tell she's smiling
when she sings. I like that.

Roughly 683,000,000 people live there, by 1994 estimates, a number that threatens to be drastically reduced by AIDS, which currently infects 28,000,000 Africans. The bittersweet good that may come of this epic plague is a renewed world interest in Africa, a continent that badly needs a little TLC, and a lot of understanding. The ignorance and shadows surrounding Africa in the minds of the masses are painful to me. Africa is an incredible, intriguing, rich and varied place, and the more I learn about it, the more I love it.

It's hard to make any accurate generalizations of Africa. As Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski says in a note at the beginning of The Shadow of the Sun, his excellent memoir of his experiences in Africa, "The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say 'Africa.' In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist."

People see the chaos and the mess that is Africa, and fail to understand that there is more to Africa than that. They also fail to understand how these problems came to be, that the blood is on the hands of the Europeans, who, in their conquests of Africa, pillaged the resources and crippled the psyche of a thousand peoples, turned tribe against tribe, fuelling hatreds and ethnic strife, and pulled out, leaving a broken Africa to heal itself. When many countries of Africa became independent of European rule, they were wholly unprepared to take the reins for themselves. Take, for example, the case of the behemoth Democratic Republic of the Congo- when the Belgians pulled out in the late fifties, the people of the Congo had to fill some 4,000 government offices, drawing from a populace in which only thirty people held college degrees. Its hardly surprising that the Congo and many other countries have fallen prey to one violent coup after another.

In many places, the rivalries were created and fed by the artificial boundaries the colonizers imposed, country lines that fallowed none of the boundaries that divided the African people, be it language, religion, or tribe. As Wole Soyinka put it, "One hundred years ago at the Berlin Conference, the colonial powers that ruled Africa met to divvy up their interests into states, lumping various peoples and tribes together in some places, or slicing them apart in others like some demented tailor who paid no attention to the fabric, color, or pattern of the quilt he was patching together.... And now we see in Rwanda what that absence of African self-redefinition has wrought. If we fail to understand that all this stems from the colonialnation-state map imposed upon us, there will be little chance to correct the situation over the long term... African leaders have been so concerned with maintaining their power and authority within these artificial ponds created by colonialism, they have been so eager to preserve their status as king toad, that they've never really addressed the humanity that is entrapped within these ponds." There you have it- a sweeping generalization, but the best insight into the political problems of modern Africa in a nutshell that I've found.

You can't really understand what Africa is like, where it's coming from and where it's going, without learning a whole hell of a lot that society and a public education has probably neglected to teach you. I heartily encourage you to learn some. For the sake of this node I've made a lot of generalizations even while insisting that generalizations shouldn't be made on this subject, and I'm certainly not an expert here. I'm just a kid who really cares about Africa and its people, and want to see good things happen there. Good things can't happen until there is knowledge.

What follows is a very brief breakdown of the regions of Africa. Please take note, this is Africa as I have divided it, and not everybody would break it down into these regions, or even define the regions as I have- the subject is certainly not cut and dry. Regardless, here it is:

There is quite a divide between North Africa and the rest of Africa, so much so that everything beneath the Sahara is often defined as just that: sub-Saharan Africa. An imaginary line running across Africa from Mauritania to Sudan divides the Arab population from the black population. The countries of southern North Africa and northern Central Africa often find themselves straddling a major cultural, ethnic, religious divide, with their population partially composed of Arab, Muslim north Africans, and the rest predominantly Christian, tribally diverse, blackAfricans. Needless to say, there have been bloody struggles over the years between the two groups.

The occupants of West Africa are primarily black Africans of tribal descent. Hundreds of different tribes call this area home, some of them displaced peoples from further inland. Like in much of Africa, countries here often fall into the grip of wars, chaos, rebels, and brutal military coups. Some areas of West Africa are quite densely populated, including Nigeria, which is by far the most populated nation in Africa. AIDS is leaving its mark here, not as devastatingly as in some parts of southern Africa, but at a horrible rate nonetheless.

Stretching from the Central African Republic, in the very heart of the continent, down through thousands of miles of jungle, savanna, and scrub forest to South Africa, is the realm of Southern and Central Africa. I probably shouldn't lump these together, but I've always had trouble distinguishing where one ends and another begins.

This area is home to the worst of the AIDS crises: many millions are infected, dead, and dying, and millions of children have been orphaned. This is a region dominated and traumatized by the incurable disease, which promises to kill more people than all the ethnic clashes and civil wars that have plagued these conflict-scarred countries. Dealing with the disease and its aftermath is a constant struggle.